


dining out

by grossferatu



Series: the terror stalking london town [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Cannibalism, Friendship, Gen, Gore, Guro, Incest, Knives, Male-Female Friendship, Referenced Patriarchal Vampire Incest, Shapeshifting, Torture, Vampire Elias Bouchard, Vampires, Werewolf Basira Hussain, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:49:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24273088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grossferatu/pseuds/grossferatu
Summary: Elias cannot take out his anger on Georgie, so he selects a stranger human.Basira is hungry and accompanies him, getting a meal out of the proceedings.(Or, how she feels about her boss/local vampire patriarch)This is not quite the Everchase.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Basira Hussain
Series: the terror stalking london town [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1749709
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	dining out

**Author's Note:**

> Gore, referenced incest, no sex, no nudity, just friendship, plus some vampire worldbuilding.

She will never get used to how her own eyes see color, bright and full spectrum even when she’s quadruped. It interferes with how she processes smell, and she’s distracted by the green grass when Elias Bouchard stands a respectful distance away and says, “Detective?”

She looks up and sprawls on the bench, senses reorganizing themselves so she can stare at him properly. “Elias, what are you doing out in public?” Wearing that face, she means, the recognizable one, the one that’s supposed to be in prison.

“Oh, I’m going for a stroll,” Elias says. “Care to join me?”

Basira stands, hips readjusting to hominid proportions, her spine contending more-or-less successfully with perpendicular gravity.

She can smell his anger. It’s less obvious than a human’s, but it’s an acrid undercurrent to the usual smell of clotting blood.

“What happened?” she asks, because she might be a creature of the Eye but it has not given her any special insight the Hunt cannot also claim, unlike Elias’s camera-hollow children.

Elias shivers, physically, and his shoulders are bowed as he tries to keep his gait human and imperceptible. He could, she knows, cast off this human face like old chitin but he will not. He will wait for the moment of terror, when the older man and younger woman transform, proving a human’s paranoia _right_ in the worst, least satisfying way.

“Georgie Barker,” Elias says, and his throat seems to close around the words as his anger is spiked through with worry. His mouth works uselessly as he forgets to breathe before he inhales sharply and continues. “She wishes my grandchildren dead.”

“Even Melanie?”

Basira isn’t surprised. She was present when Jon’s calm snapped and he sank his teeth into the back of Melanie’s neck and dragged her off to Peter’s office, a plan to help going awry at resistance and the smell of blood. She has even turned Georgie away from the Archives in these last weeks, apologetic and giving her the same line she gives every new visitor: the Archivist will only take live statements, the assistants are busy, if she will wait for him to be ready they may speak.

Georgie thinks Basira is still human in some salvageable way, that she is whole in a way that anchors Daisy, that there are choices to be made that involve a world that is healthy. She pities Basira, trapped and unwilling and so well-behaved despite it all.

“I am not one to agree with Christian doctrine, but it has always struck me as needlessly cruel to say it is better someone die than be overcome,” Elias says, his accent briefly slipping into something older. He snarls, openly, for a moment, and Basira thinks of a perpetually betrayed Georgian youth and what it means to acquire a family mostly against one’s own will. “She refused Melanie and insulted Tim,” he says, and Basira doesn’t have any divine insight to fill in the gaps but his anger is enough.

Basira gave up her own humanity when she realized her choice had become Daisy or the world, that the things that made Daisy _alive_ and _in Basira’s arms_ were things she would condemn Jon for doing, even before she knew that he was no longer only pulling statements to feed.

That is the simple version she tells herself, but it is easier than thinking about how her joints ache less when she is in her other shape.

“And so,” Basira says. “You hunt alone?”

Elias smiles. “Not alone, no,” and looks to her expectantly.

She nods. “Why?”

“It seems a waste,” Elias says. His hand traces idly down the side of his jacket. There is a knife there, then, and he will be using that and not his teeth or fingernails. He will not be eating his victim; this will be anger, then, not hunger, that drives him. “You ought not starve yourself on my account.”

Basira’s laugh is more dog than human being, and she says, “I don’t like eating with my hands.”

Elias nods, the information remembered like a dietary preference. “Stay like this until he sees us,” he says, the please unspoken but present. He doesn’t order her around, unlike his family. She’s his employee. Her choices are not his to make cages of anymore.

There is a fixed CCTV camera that watches the sidewalk and trashcans behind a well-lit, pleasant restaurant. It is the waning hours of day—dusk soon—and Elias accosts him with a hand in his jacket, the other gripping his shirt collar from behind. He is handsome to Elias’s tastes, echoing lovers Basira knows are long dead.

He cannot speak before Elias slits his throat, ignoring the red welling up immediately from the broad slice. Elias smiles for the camera, enjoying the feeling of a mechanical eye on himself. He will have to use this footage productively, someday, but for now it is merely proof that he is as ever uncaged.

Elias guides him gently to the ground and sits himself with his knees between his victim’s thighs.

Basira holds his upper body down without being asked.

Elias’s work is quick, aided by supernatural, anger-quickened strength. He slits the man’s belly, first, even as his breath gurgles out of his throat, and lets the organs spill out. The ribs are more difficult, the knife required as a lever, fingers used in place of forceps as he pulls the chest open with autopsy efficiency, exposing lungs and heart and cartilage.

His form has wavered smaller, and the man gazes into the green eyes, upturned nose and cupid’s bow lips of a young Jonah Magnus.

The man is now gutted a little like an anatomy lesson. He will die soon of shock, as his exposed heart spasms itself to death alongside his bloodless brain and his empty viscera. Jonah looks up and smiles at Basira with his very human teeth and says, “I know you like organ meat.”

The warmth in Basira’s chest is extremely mammalian. She watches the man’s mouth open and close into wordless questions. One of them must be interesting, because Jonah makes a personable chirring noise and says, “Nothing. You are a surrogate. Is it not lovely? This is not your fault.”

He tries to gurgle-scream, but Basira covers his mouth with one large paw and bites his heart out of his open chest, severing connective tissue with a shake of her head.

“Dramatic,” Jonah says, as the man stops twitching.

Basira is too busy chewing to respond. She circles the cooling corpse once, gore dripping from her jaws, and swallows the heart in messy gulps before settling herself by its slit torso.

Jonah sits, cross-legged, next to her, and pets her thick fur as she eats. The street is silent except for the sounds of human flesh and lupine breathing. She is warm like this, a furnace under his fingers, and his awareness of the camera’s mechanical eye watching him pleases him greatly.

She stands when she is done, and Jonah follows suit. She is up to his hips when he is in this shape, and it is with some regret that changes himself back to Elias.

They leave the body where it lies to be found, and thus the gods will feed. 

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! I'm enjoying writing this series a lot.


End file.
